Spurgeon on the Substitutionary Atonement

“If you take away the blood of sprinkling from the gospel, you have silenced it. It has no voice if this be gone. ‘Oh,’ they say, ‘the gospel has lost its power!’ What wonder when they have made it a dumb gospel! How can it have power when they take away that which is its life and speech?

Unless the preacher is evermore preaching this blood, and sprinkling it by the doctrine of faith, his teaching has no voice either to rouse the careless or to cheer the anxious. If ever there should come a wretched day when all our pulpits shall be full of modern thought, and the old doctrine of a substitutionary sacrifice shall be exploded, then will there remain no word of comfort for the guilty or hope for the despairing.

Hushed will be forever those silver notes which now console the living, and cheer the dying; a dumb spirit will possess this sullen world, and no voice of joy will break the blank silence of despair. The gospel speaks through the propitiation for sin, and if that be denied, it speaketh no more. Those who preach not the atonement exhibit a dumb and dummy gospel; a mouth it hath, but speaketh not; they that make it are like unto their idol. …

Would you have me silence the doctrine of the blood of sprinkling? Would any one of you attempt so horrible a deed?

Shall we be censured if we continually proclaim the heaven-sent message of the blood of Jesus? Shall we speak with bated breath because some affected person shudders at the sound of the word ‘blood’ or some ‘cultured’ individual rebels at the old-fashioned thought of sacrifice?

Nay, verily, we will sooner have our tongue cut out than cease to speak of the precious blood of Jesus Christ. For me there is nothing worth thinking of or preaching about but this grand truth, which is the beginning and the end of the whole Christian system, namely, that God gave his Son to die that sinners might live.”

- C.H. Spurgeon, sermon 1888, “The Blood of Sprinkling” in volume 32 of sermons (1886).